Here and There

Very cool discovery announced today by the journal Nature.

Additionally, readable article in today’s NY Times.

They’re saying this early “human” may have lived in a time after we began walking upright, on two legs, yet still used fore legs (arms) to walk on occasion. Those strong arms also allowed the species to climb and swing through trees. Ape-men (or, in this case, baby girls), indeed.

And this was a relatively complete fossil:

Dr. Alemseged’s team spent much of the last five years extracting the rest of the specimen from the surrounding stone with dentist’s drills and picks. The tedious work exposed the full cranium and jaws, the torso and spinal column, limbs and the left foot.

Also noteworthy is a discovery of a bone that could signify early speech in the baby afarensis:

The presence of a hyoid bone was a surprise. It is a rarely preserved bone in the larynx, or voice box, that supports muscles of the throat and tongue. The bone in the infant appeared to be primitive and more similar to those found in apes than humans, the scientists said, but is the first hyoid found in such an early human-related species and thus important in research about the origins of human speech.

I remember reading in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything how difficult it is for anything to fossilize. That alone makes this discovery important. But especially the bits mentioned above give paleoanthropologists more evidence for theories on the early development of an ancestor species.

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